Private Sector Development

Starting this month, an estimated 9 million women will be able to get behind the wheel in Saudi Arabia after the historic announcement in September last year lifting the ban on women from driving. While international attention has often focused on the driving ban on women in Saudi Arabia, it has often missed the fact that women in several other countries are legally debarred from certain driving jobs. The World Bank’s recently released Women, Business and the Law 2018 report finds that 19 countries around the world legally restrict women from working in the transport sector in the same way as men.

With this idea in mind, and the powerful belief that "brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not," Andela, founded four years ago, began recruiting recent graduates in Africa with the mission of connecting them to job opportunities in high-tech companies. Today, about 650 developers in Lagos, Nairobi, and Kampala work full-time for over 100 firms spread across 45 cities worldwide.

We learned that from potatoes and waste recycling in Lebanon to aquaculture and poultry in Zambia, it is possible to have a standardized base guideline; however, the methodology still needs to be adjusted for specific economic, political and social contexts. (Photo: Dominic Chavez / World Bank)

There is a well-known idiom saying that you can't compare apples and oranges. But this is precisely the challenge researchers often face when it comes to measuring the jobs impact of development projects. Having standardized impact evaluation tools and methods is a milestone for private sector-led job investments, and it allows international financial institutions, development practitioners, and governments to build on existing knowledge to develop solutions. And this is precisely one of the goals that Let's Work partnership, composed of 30 different institutions, is currently pursuing; to track the number of jobs generated from private sector-led interventions, the quality of those jobs, and how inclusive those jobs are in a standardized way, so apples are compared to apples and oranges to oranges.

The youth employment challenge is a stubborn reality in all regions and nearly every country. Over 35 per cent of the estimated 201 million unemployed people today are youth (between the ages of 15 and 24). Worldwide, the challenge is not only to create jobs but to ensure quality jobs for young people who are often underemployed, work in the informal economy, or engage in vulnerable employment. Today, two out of every five young people in the labor force are either working but poor or unemployed.

Curious to learn about their future professional ambitions, we asked one class of students how many of them would like to work in the private sector after they graduate. Only about 10% of the students raised their hands. We also asked them how many would like to work for the government. This time, around 20% raised their hands.

One of the challenges of measuring jobs is addressing impacts that go beyond direct jobs. A tool called tracer surveys is helping do this.
Photo: Chhor Sokunthea / World Bank

In addition to correctly measuring the jobs directly generated from interventions and investments, development agencies also need to estimate the resulting indirect impacts and general equilibrium effects. These are hard to measure. My recent blog highlighted the progress that donors, international financial institutions, and other multilateral agencies are making in developing standardized tools to measure these impacts. In addition to standardization, the focus is now on strengthening existing measurement tools and addressing the challenges that are left.

An interview with Michal Rutkowski, Senior Director for the World Bank’s Social Protection and Jobs Group

What are some of the challenges faced by countries trying to create jobs in today’s world? How do we deal with informal jobs, and should we really fear robots taking away jobs? We caught up with Michal Rutkowski, Senior Director for the World Bank’s Social Protection and Jobs Group, to get his insights on these key issues and what they mean for the work that we do.

Several new tools are helping development finance institutions measure the impact of the private sector investments on jobs. Photo: Salahaldeen Nadir / World Bank

Let’s Work, a global partnership of over 30 organizations, is piloting tools that can help Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) measure the impact of private sector investments on jobs. The aim is for partners to not only measure jobs in the same consistent way, but also along the same nuanced dimensions: number of jobs gained, the quality of those jobs, and who gets those jobs (inclusiveness). One of the measurement methods being developed by the Partnership is the Jobs in Value Chains Survey tool.

For the poor and vulnerable of the world, jobs are key to ending poverty and driving development. But not all jobs are equally transformational. Photo: Jonathan Ernst / World Bank

Jobs are what we earn, what we do, and sometimes even who we are. For the poor and vulnerable of the world, jobs are key to ending poverty and driving development. But not all jobs are equally transformational. Good jobs add value to society, taking into account the benefits they have on the people who hold them, and the potential spillover effects on others. For example, inclusive jobs, such as those that employ women, can change the way families spend money and invest in the education and health of children.